Sometimes I feel weird posting about stuff I've bought to do videos on, because like, i have a patreon, so I feel like if I'm gonna do Early Access Content I should be doing it on there. But also, absolutely nobody has ever cared whether i do or don't deliver any kind of bonus content, and also this isn't a video, and also that kind of behavior is crazymaking. So anyway, I got something "weird" from ebay yesterday that has made a fool of me by not being weird.

My last YT video was about a circa-Y2K MP3 player that's meant to go in a stereo system. While researching that, I came across some magazine reviews* of other "MP3 jukeboxes" which figured in to the narrative, but next to those were reviews of network audio streaming boxes.

* I'm not an expert on how magazines operate, but it seems like the pages in question are not actually reviews, but are more like just ads. Whenever I see the one-paragraph description (which I've just been calling a blurb) it feels strongly as if the magazine has never seen the product in question, and is just paraphrasing some ad copy.

It feels surprising that anyone was making these in 2000-2001. The first time I ever heard about in-house streaming audio was in the last couple years of the decade, so I never really thought about it before then, and it feels implausible since very few people had home LANs at the time (this will come up again.) There's also this part of me that just can't accept that a Pentium 2 or 3 could reliably stream audio at all.

Of course that's completely silly. We're talking about a 320kbps-max file, three or four megs total in size. Ethernet wasn't universal, but it was readily available, for cheap, and the slowest version ever available to consumers pushed 10 megabits. Even taking heavy packet loss over inappropriate CAT3, it should be nearly impossible to get less than a megabit.

Since a couple cheap RAM chips can buffer an entire song in the receiving device, there's really nothing surprising about this at all. The price wasn't even that bad, around $300, since such a device wouldn't require much complexity, nor a hard drive.

I went looking for one after I finished that video, and I found the Dell Digital Audio Receiver - pictured above - on eBay for about $25. It's actually a rebadged (literally identical) Rio Receiver, which I think was sold a bit earlier.

The premise is very simple: You plug it into your LAN, run a server app on your PC, and it will play MP3s over the network from whichever folder you choose. You can put it in your living room and plug it into your stereo receiver via RCA or 3.5mm, you can connect a pair of unpowered speakers to its built-in amplifier, or you can connect headphones to the front.

The screen on the front grants access to your library via a menu browser interface, where you can select artists, albums, etc. The speaker and headphone outputs have adjustable volume, and the device has an IR remote for playback and volume control. All in all, quite a nice design for the era, especially since "just plug an old laptop into your stereo" was even less valid an idea than it is now.

(It sucks now and it sucked 10 years ago, you always owed yourself something more dignified than that - but 20 years ago, very few people had a "spare" laptop that could handle MP3 decoding at all, even nerds.)

I thought it would be fun to do a quick demo of this gadget, so I ordered it. While waiting, I did a little research and found references to the client software hosting it's own DHCP server. This makes a lot of sense.

As noted, very few people had home LANs in 1999-2000. Yes, I know you did. I did too. We are not "most people." The overwhelming majority of people had never heard of ethernet, and many motherboards were still being sold without built-in networking. New computers probably mostly had it, but lots of people didn't have new computers.

Even if you had the capability, you'd probably never used it, because you didn't have broadband.

According to Pew Research, broadband proliferation hadn't reached 50% even by early 2006. It hadn't even reached 10% by the end of 2001. And nobody was using Ethernet for anything other than broadband, except for the highest power nerds (my family.)

No broadband meant no router, and that meant no DHCP server. One of the saddest oversights in Ethernet is that they never came up with a good method for two devices, plugged directly together, to recognize that fact and work out an addressing scheme. Link-local doesn't work, I don't even know why. So for this device to talk to your PC, you needed to run a DHCP server on your PC. It makes perfect sense, and this isn't even the first time I've seen it from a Y2K era device.

Obviously, this is a problem for a modern network. We all have our own DHCP servers, and can't have some 22 year old piece of shitware polluting our LAN with 192.168.0.x IPs. I also got the impression from what little info I could find that it was using DHCP Options to tell the device where the media server (your PC) was; this is even worse.

So, my battle plan was as follows:

• Device arrives

• Turn up a Virtualbox VM with Windows 98 and connect it to my LAN

• Install the software

• Turn off my household DHCP server and start up the Dell device

• Use Wireshark to capture a DHCP exchange, figure out what it's doing, and duplicate any options onto a specialized reserved lease

• Figure out how to block the DHCP traffic from the VM

I budgeted two hours for this if it went well, ∞ hours if not.

So the device arrives.

It's in great condition. It doesn't come with the software (although the seller threw in a serial port GPS for some reason...?) so I have to go looking for that. To my chagrin (damn that's a word I haven't used in years,) there's nothing on Internet Archive.

After digging and despairing for 15 minutes, I suddenly find the Rio Receiver forums.

Okay, well, it's the Empeg forums. Empeg was a British company who made a product circa 1998 called the Car - yes, just, the Car - which was the earliest vehicular MP3 player. Rio bought it and relabeled it as the Rio Car, and apparently some of the development was parlayed into the Rio Receiver. There was, unsurprisingly, a significant usergroup built up around the Empeg Car (this was incredibly common in the Y2K era) so their forum (sorry, BBS) also provided a home for the related Rio products.

The FAQ forum includes "Where can I get the latest Rio Receiver software?" It turns out that the Dell uses the exact same software with a different logo, so you can just install the Rio stuff, and they had it on their website. It's down now, of course, but fortunately, Internet Archive got it.

Thank god for Brewster's Public iDrive.

I started up VirtualBox, but before I could look for my W98 VM, it occurred to me... why not just fucking, install it? On my PC? On Windows 10?

Turns out it works perfectly. And on startup, it asked me if I wanted to enable the DHCP server - and it was off, by default. That strongly suggests that, by the time Rio released this updated software, home LAN proliferation had become common enough that they wanted to avoid polluting people's networks. It also suggests that a specialized DHCP server isn't needed at all.

So I turned around, plugged an Ethernet cable into the Dell receiver, turned it on, and...

...it just worked. Instantly. there were no further steps that had to be taken, it just plain worked, as if I'd gotten it out of the box in 2000 and plugged it in.

Well, fuck me.

I Guess This Is How My Wife Feels!!!!!!!!

I budgeted two hours. This took 15 minutes. It was probably not much faster to have installed it with the original CD, given how slow drives of the time were.

So now what? I mean, I can make a video out of this - I'd been planning on an aggressive strategy of shorter-form Content anyway - but, what am I supposed to do with the rest of my night? It Just Worked. Damnit!

Well, there are still questions. For one, what are the format limitations? The manual just says MP3 and WMA, but makes no mention of bitrate. I'm going to assume it'll go up to 320kbps MP3, and who cares about WMA. I'll test this later (the MP3 part, fuck WMA.)

And: what's the deal with the phone jacks? It clearly has RJ11s labeled "Phone" and "Wall", so, was it meant to dial up to something...? That doesn't make sense, even ignoring the fact that dialup cannot stream MP3 in any reasonable quality.

I had to dig a little bit to figure this out, and then it hit me like the proverbial ton of freight trains: It's fucking phoneline networking.

Those jacks are for HPNA (HomePNA (more like Home T&A!!!!!)), which is sorta like powerline ethernet. You plug the device into a phone jack in your house, but instead of sending a signal down your phone line, it imposes a high band frequency division multiplexed data signal, which can be picked up by anything else connected to the same line. It's sorta like DSL technology - you can't hear it if you pick up the phone, and in fact, a DSL filter will break it.

Rio had sold a card called the Rio Connector, and I hadn't been able to figure out what it was for. I thought it might just be a rebadged ethernet card, but now I realize it was a rebadged HPNA card. In fact, the Rio Receiver FAQ says you can use third party HPNA, so now that's gotta go in the video.

This solves the problem I brought up earlier: People didn't have LANs, and even if you did have an ethernet port on your PC, who the hell wanted to run a cable through the attic or drag it across the living room? My family did exactly that (we had five cables running down the hallway floor for like two years) but it was an ugly tripping hazard and we lived in a psuedo-hoarder house, so we weren't exactly typical consumers.

Lots of houses had phone jacks all over the place, though. There was probably one in the living room, and phone cables are much smaller and easier to hide along the baseboard. As long as your PC was also near a jack, you were good to go - no extra infrastructure needed. Fucking brilliant, I love it.

Now, as cool as that is, once you get the thing working, the functionality itself... leaves a little to be desired.

As I addressed in my video on the MusicStore, nobody knew how to make a browsing interface before the iPod, it really invented the concept as we know it. When you're navigating through your library on the Receiver, you can choose these options:

• Artist - You can pick an artist, then it shows you all tracks by that artist. Yes, all tracks, not albums. They're just all jumbled together.

• Album - You can pick an album. Any album, across your entire library; it does not let you filter by artist. And once you select an album... the tracks are sorted alphabetically.

• Track - Every single track in your library is displayed. No sorting or filtering. If you have more than 3,000 tracks, it just fails.

• Genre - I mean, sure

• Playlist - Yes, it reads M3Us.

And it's good that it reads M3Us, because otherwise it would be unusable. The advice on the Empeg forums is "make playlists, there is no other way to fix this." It's an intrinsic problem with either the server or the firmware.

Fortunately, both have been replaced. Unfortunately, it happened in 2002.

There are at least a half dozen alternative media servers. It turns out the server is just an HTTP file server plus something called "SSDP" - presumably how the device found my PC so fast. But the ones I've looked at were last updated before 2005, and the open source situation in the early 2000s was pretty rough, lots of font-family:serif pages with very little real info other than a brief changelog, some tips, and a link to a tarball. I haven't tried these yet but my hopes aren't high.

The firmware has also been replaced by another project called Rioplay. It turns out (absolutely unsurprisingly) that the Receiver has no concept of firmware updates because it has no firmware onboard. It only has enough intelligence to bootstrap itself onto the network and then slurp the application over from the host machine. So to "install" Rioplay, you simply replace one file on your desktop, and when you reboot the Receiver, bam, there it is.

Sadly, this too is from 2004, and very unfinished. I got it running, but it's basically unusable. It has moderate improvements to library browsing but several things seem to be simply unimplemented. There might be other replacement firmware out there, I'll have to look.

Honestly though, the best solution is probably just playlists. This device was probably never really appealing to the rando non-nerd, but for the price, size and simplicity, it would have whipped ass in the early 2000s, even compared to "just plug a laptop into your stereo," a practice I will continue to berate (it sucks so bad, why do people claim it doesn't.)

If the only cost is that you need to make playlists of each album, that's not too bad if your library isn't gargantuan. You could even Write a Program for it, and it wouldn't be too demeaning a waste of your One Life.

The other thing this firmware is supposed to do is make FLAC playback possible. I hadn't expected this, but apparently the SoC in the Receiver is fast enough that it's doing all audio decoding in software! Rioplay simply includes libflac (and libvorbis), but I think I need to replace the media server to get it to index those, so I haven't tried it yet.

Overall, I kinda love this thing. I was astonished that it Just Worked and I think it must have been mindblowing for anyone who recognized it for what it was in its day. Do I recommend you get one yourself?

OH fuck no, haha